"bent" wrote in message
...

Somewhere I learned that error checking or parity type memory is designed
to
protect against cosmic rays, way up in the EM spectrum, and rarely happens
to anyone anywhere. How infrequently, from where these rays come from and
what they're like and whether this is the primary design consideration for
this hardware I don't know, but would like to.


Nope - error check in all of its forms (whether it's parity, ECC, CRC,
checksum, etc) is all about checking for picked or dropped bits, regardless
of the cause. Error checking really does not know about, care about outside
causes, and was not created with any one cause in mind over any other.

--

-Mike-